But then they say ‘from the creator of Notting Hill, Love Actually and Four Weddings‘ on all promotional material, and suddenly I lose all interest.

Is this really the right time for comfort food? You know, skyrocketing unemployment, riots in some countries, general feeling of unrest, the future’s so dim you can’t possibly wear shades… yes, lets make an old-fashioned Richard Curtis movie! That’ll capture the zeitgeist perfectly!!!

I’m not saying I’d necessarily hate the film if I saw it, but Love Actually turned out to be a tribute to everything I hate about romantic comedies, so I can’t take that risk.

Talk really, really loudly on the phone. Every night. For hours. Yell if you need to. When asked to talk more quietly, apologise profusely and then completely disregard the request.

Don’t ever, ever clean anything. Just don’t. Your mother used to do all that for you, why should you start now? Why grow up? Even though you’re in your 30s? In fact, just to hammer home your point that other people should be cleaning up after you, place dirty dishes in the cupboards, in the rack among the clean dishes, or even throw them out the window if you really feel like it. Whatever.

Don’t turn off the stove top when you’re finished with it. Your mother used to do that for you. Forget that it’s a safety hazard. Burn through the filament. Let it burn! Melt the fish slice and then hide it among the garbage in the hope that no one will find it and eventually forget that it ever existed.

Leave the taps running as well. Your mother used to turn them off for you.

Eventually, put some chickpeas in a pan, place them on the stove at full power and go out for the rest of the day. The chickpeas will be burned to a crisp by the time someone gets home, the entire flat will be smoked out, the pan will be burned through and the stovetop will actually catch fire when the pan is removed.

All this time, deny everything. Even though three of the five people in the flat never use the kitchen anyway and the fourth person has been there far longer than you without any of these problem. Also, you’re the only person who cooks curry. When caught out, admit to making a mistake this once but promise it will never happen again and insist that it never happened before.

Before you actually get kicked out, when you feel it’s about to happen anyway, volunteer to leave the flat yourself. Make it sound as if you’ve been driven out by the unreasonable demands of your flatmates – you know, hygiene, common sense and general safety. Just behave as indignant as possible.

Also, your art really sucks. Maybe, in some sort of bizarre reversal of faith healing, you are actually trying to make people go blind?

Mr. Nobody has never made his/her work public before so he/she is having a little trouble adjusting to the idea of his/her work appearing on the internet. In other words, the project involving the flying woman in her underpants is on hold until Mr. Nobody feels confident enough to exist on the internet.

Ah well…

In the meantime I’m trying to learn to draw properly myself. I realised while I was finishing Mr. Nobody’s drawing that the ability to draw actual proper cartoons might not necessarily be as beyond me as I had previously thought. Small steps…

I’m glad I have patience. While other people feel they need to have at least one great success before they’re 24 (because surely if Mozart wrote his first hit broadway musical while still in the womb, anyone who isn’t similarly precocious is an UTTER FAILURE), I’m aiming for a modest success by the time I’m 30.

My girlfriend read the Conan stories recently so I thought I’d borrow the movie from Aro Video and watch it with her. Rewatching it after fifteen years or so I was expecting to find it stupid and pointless, but actually it made me nostalgic for when stupid and pointless movies used to be simple and entertaining.

I was thinking of all the unbearable changes they’d make to the films if they remade them. Everyone would have short hair for a start, probably that short spiky hair style that almost every male has had for the last decade. There would also be designer stubble. Conan would be 18 and full of angst. Probably he would pout and say ‘it’s not fair!’ when the baddies gang up on him. Other times he’d just have an obnoxious smirk all the time. He’d have an annoying excitable sidekick straight out of Buffy the Vampire Slayer who’d make up words (‘wordificate’) all the time. The final act of revenge would be an epic computer generated battle with lots of explosions, rather than Arnie’s understated cutting-off-of-the-head. There would be WAY more dialogue, because what the world really needs is a couple of mismatched barbarians comedically discussing how to get blood stains out of leather. And Conan and the love interest would hate each other on first sight and exchange cutting remarks for three quarters of the film, even though the story isn’t really that much of a romantic comedy.

To summarise, Conan may be dated sword-and-sandal trash, but it’s still much better than UPdated sword-and-sandal trash.

“So David, after all you were saying about men writing women unrealistically… you now have a woman flying around in her underwear?”

“There’s a reason for it, I swear! I just… don’t know what it is yet.”

I need to develop a faster way to turn pencil sketches into completed panels. Probably this will involve practice. My working title for this project is ‘Nuclear Vintler’ because the words popped into my head and I liked them.

Mr. Nobody and I have been discussing that comic with the women with the magic dresses. I’m not promising anything since Mr. Nobody will only work on the project if they don’t have to work on the project if they don’t want to, and we torrent new TV shows faster than we can watch them, but we’re both generally enthusiastic.

The one thing I’m worried about is the kind of sexist anti-sexism that occurs when men try to write women. It’s a thing I’ve noticed in a lot of in progressive cavemen and it takes various forms:

1) Writing in token ‘realistic’ women who have none of the flaws that the men are allowed to have. Because writing a woman with flaws would be SEXIST! And writing an intelligent woman with a realistic body type is FEMINIST! Although when you refer to your female character as ‘a female’ when all your male characters have actual personalities, you’re betraying your misogyny somewhat. Yes, it’s progressive misogyny, but it’s still misogyny.

2) Writing smart, articulate, intelligent computer-literate, mathematically able women, not because you wish to represent them in a positive manner but because that’s what your ideal woman is like. Coincidentally, your ideal woman will also continue dating you when you’re dating other women and fall for every lame pick-up line. Some men represent their ideal women as thin and large-breasted, some represent their ideal women as intelligent and promiscuous. It’s still basically pornography.

3) Joss Whedon. Just because your women aren’t damsels in distress, just because they’re solving their own problems and often rescuing men in distress, doesn’t mean you’re not heavily objectifying them at the same time. Sheesh.

Anyway. Neo-misogyny: progressive, but not progressed enough. It’s a token effort NOT to appear sexist, but for the wrong reasons and in the wrong way.

I was hoping that now Obama was in power, the US would sane up. Apparently not. The propaganda has just become more insidious.

I wonder if this information about the rant being preconceived months in advance will become popular and undermine what they’re trying to achieve, or if the mainstream media will just ignore it. Either way, it’ll be interesting to see how it plays out.

I spend all my time at work writing comics in my head, but I can’t draw. Then I have this friend called ‘Mr. Nobody’ who likes to draw, but who doesn’t like to write. Then there’s me again, who can scan pencil drawings and fiddle with them endlessly in PhotoShop.

It took us a year to figure out that we could possibly do something with this.

Mr. Nobody doesn’t want credit for their work, but I don’t want it either, so I guess that means I’m collaborating with nobody. As usual.

Mr. Nobody and I are discussing a comic about four women with magic dresses. The women are of varied ethnicity and body shape, unlike the women in any project by Joss Whedon. They also solve their problems without access to a massive talent for martial arts, unlike the women in any project by Joss Whedon.

This comic is wrong. Westley didn’t stay with the Dread Pirate Roberts because Buttercup was with Humperdinck, he did it because he was a prisoner. The only reason Westley didn’t go back to Buttercup when he became free was that she’d become engaged to the prince by that time. Also, the Dread Pirate Roberts was never reported to have killed anyone – in fact, the one person he said he would kill, he didn’t.

I should write a strongly worded letter to the editor.

Apparently Guillermo Del Toro is shopping everywhere in Wellington these days. I sold him some Doctor Who DVDs last year, but now my girlfriend has sold him some children’s books. I no longer feel special.

I’ve been a bit distraced lately. The new Lego Pirates sets were released a couple of weeks ago and I ‘ad to ‘ave ’em. They are awesome. After twenty years of waiting I finally have a lego pirate ship. What’s not to be distracted about?

I realised a couple of days ago that in all the time I’ve had this blog I haven’t posted any anecdotes about work. I’m quite proud of that. When I was on LiveJournal, half of the posts I read were rants about stupid customers or stupid co-workers or stupid people in management. I got sick of it after a while and that’s one of the reasons I shifted to the much less inane WordPress. I already know how stupid people can be, reading reminders all the time just makes me depressed.

I need to start writing a book. I’ve been in a state of literary ‘why bother?’ for a while since most of the stuff I want to write isn’t really what publishers are interested in and I never like my work enough to market it properly on the internet, but it’s the only thing I know I’m actually capable of finishing.